Asset Based Community Development

Instead of focusing on a community’s needs, deficiencies and problems, Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) helps communities become stronger and more self-reliant by discovering, mapping and mobilizing all their local assets.

Few people realize how many assets any community has:

the skills of its citizens, from youth to disabled people, from thriving professionals to starving artists;

the resources of its formal institutions — businesses, schools, libraries, community colleges, hospitals, parks, social service agencies.

By the late 1990s, communities around the country were mapping and using these resources in imaginative ways, bringing them out of the closet and into creative synergy with each other, with dramatic results. Asset-based community development has provided leaders and institutions in all sectors with an approach that is relatively cheap, effective and empowering, that avoids paternalism and dependence — an approach that can be supported by all parts of the political spectrum and initiated at any level of civic life.

Also check out the seminal book by John P. Kretzmann and John L. McKnight, “Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community’s Assets.” Published by the Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research, 1993.